


Pretty simple

by Kes



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Ethical Dilemmas, Gen, Sokovia Accords, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-06 00:25:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6729733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>HERE BE CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR SPOILERS</p><p>So, we didn't get to see much of the debate around the Accords among the team in the film, and nobody really got their teeth into it. So I thought I would.</p><p>This is a script-fic of the Avengers arguing about the Sokovia Accords.</p><p> </p><p>  <em>Rhodey: They’re saying you’re making unilateral decisions that affect the rest of the world without any means for the world to get its say or even call you to answer.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty simple

Dramatis personae:  
Steve Rogers  
Vision  
Tony Stark  
Sam Wilson  
James Rhodes  
Wanda Maximoff  
Natasha Romanoff

Steve: Look. I’m not pretending we’re infalliable. I’m not pretending no-one died. But think about the other case scenario. We don’t intervene in New York. Loki takes over the city and then the world. Best case scenario, Manhattan gets nuked. Generations of devastation across the eastern seaboard. We don’t touch Washington. Hydra kills millions of people based on a predictive algorithm of who might oppose them, and has a clear path to its nightmare vision. We don’t go to Sokovia. Ultron drops the city, everyone inside it dies, everyone outside it in a huge radius dies. Nick Fury was right – he said that we needed a response team, and he trusted us to be that response team. Because in all of those cases, waiting for authorisation would have meant being too late. If we’re not free to respond, we’re not a response team. We’re just clean-up. If we even live that long.

Vision: Over the last few years, since Tony Stark announced that he was Iron Man, the number of people like us, augmented beings, has risen sharply, year on year. The number of these world threatening events has risen along with it. There is a… correlation. Our power seems to attract opposition.

Tony: Remember New York? Loki knew he had to beat us on the big stage, so he made it big, he made it personal, he made it cataclysmic. If there’s oversight on us, challenging us in a big fight isn’t the only thing our enemies can do, so we as a world can fight in ways that don’t involve levelling cities.

Sam: Oh yeah. Hobbling us is gonna go so well. Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s get the bad guys to sign the Accords!

Rhodey: All right, so you’re saying that we need to be free to act in order to stop the bad guys? What if we applied that everywhere? How about the police? Give them licence to do what they want because oh, they’re only shooting bad guys, right? There’s such a thing as innocent until proven guilty, Sam.

Sam: Yeah, and accountability’s going so well for them. Accountability won’t make us right, Rhodes. The only thing that’ll make us right is being right, looking at situations and asking ‘what can we save out of this?’

Tony: But how do we know?

Steve: How do we know our handlers are right? I tried following orders for SHIELD, and it turned out I was working for Hydra.

Tony: The entire UN isn’t going to be Hydra, Rogers, you’ve got to stop seeing Nazis everywhere –

Steve: You’re trying to outsource your conscience, Tony. Appease your guilt by pushing it off onto someone else. That’s not how it works.

Sam: You’ve got to figure out how to carry it.

Wanda: How to use it to keep yourself in check.

Vision: That’s what he’s trying to do. Isn’t it?

Tony: Exactly! Exactly.

Steve: Just because you don’t trust yourself –

Natasha: Look, nobody’s saying your judgement’s inevitably wrong, Steve. They’re saying it’s not enough.

Rhodey: They’re saying you’re making unilateral decisions that affect the rest of the world without any means for the world to get its say or even call you to answer.

Steve: Someone’s got to call it from the ground. Someone’s got to have that perspective. A committee, they don’t have that – if we’re remembering New York, Tony, remember the nuke?

Tony: Yeah, and I remember it was Fury warned me and cleared me to deal with it.

Sam: Oh, now you’re playing the guy who follows orders?

Steve: Nick trusted us to deal with it, but it wasn’t him that fired the nuke. Nick’s more like us than he is the World Security Council. What’s his position on this? Did you even ask him?

Vision: Officially, Nicholas Fury is a dead man.

Steve: And we all know that’s not true. We all know we owe him.

Natasha: You’re getting off the point. The point is, the world doesn’t trust us. It’s asking us to prove that we’re more than weapons by meeting it halfway, and these accords are how we do that. If the world can’t trust us, can’t even see us, what right do we have to speak for it and protect it?

Wanda: More right than we have to let it fall.

Vision: And if we hurt people doing something they never wanted us to do?

Wanda: If people get hurt because we didn’t do something we could? There are dangers in the world, people who don’t care if others get hurt as long as they get their way. I joined because I wasn’t going to be one of those people. So did you, Natasha.

Tony: That’s my point! Because I care if people get hurt, I’m going to put myself under the oversight of people whose job is to stop people getting hurt.

Sam: And if they don’t know about the threat? Or don’t believe you? Or don’t have a meeting till it’s too late and they’re all dead? Our enemies don’t care about casualties, and we have to take that threat seriously enough to be on our toes. In this sort of thing, even seconds are vital. Every second we spend waiting for a decision is a life lost, or two, or two million.

Steve: It’s not an ideal situation, but it’s the one we’ve got.

Vision: And if you decide wrong? What process is there, as it exists now, to make sure you consider all the variables, know all the facts? I am acutely aware of all the things I do not know. If we think we know everything there is to know, not only are we wrong, but we are dangerously wrong.

Rhodey: And we’re people whose dangerously wrong is a lot more serious than Joe on the corner.

Steve: That goes for anyone who gives our orders, as well, and they don’t know the situation on the ground.

Natasha: They’re not going to put us under mind control. Look, steering with one hand is better than having no control at all.

Sam: So if we refuse, we get no control? What does that mean?

Tony: If you don’t sign, you’ll be asked to retire.

Wanda: How can I retire from what I am?

Steve: And how are they going to make us? You mean that, Nat? Do you trust them not to try to seize control by any means necessary? All of them? Large groups of people have agreed to atrocities before, and it wouldn’t be the first time the government decided to try to contain an enhanced being any way they could. Look at what happened to Banner – and that was Secretary Ross.

Rhodey: If you’re at the point of saying ‘how are they going to make us,’ Steve, then you’re saying you won’t stand down. You’re saying you’d rather keep endangering people, you’d rather incite violence against you, than come to a peaceful solution. You know, Tony, I used to respect this guy.

Sam: These accords will be a peaceful solution until, let’s see, next Tuesday when the next wave of bug aliens or octopus Nazis comes to try to take over the world. Then they’ll doom us.

Steve: I’m not the one making threats against my own team.

Tony: Did you hear me make a threat? Nat? Vision?

Wanda: Don’t play stupid.

Natasha: Don’t be naïve. We’re a team and we need to stay that way, but we need to do it without trampling on the people we’re trying to protect. If we start threatening each other, we start to turn on each other, and if we fight we become a greater threat than our enemies. It’s Swakopmund all over again.

Steve: So don’t make us fight. It’s pretty simple.

**Author's Note:**

> (Swakopmund is what I have decided to refer to as the African city from AoU. Still annoyed it was never named - or even mentioned in Cap 3.)


End file.
